Marni Soupcoff: Why school is supposed to suck

Why school is supposed to suck

In an early episode of comedian Louis C.K.’s comedy series Louie, the divorced father of two attends a PTA meeting for the first time. The assembled parents are wringing their hands about ways to address the ongoing “fatigue problem” — a school-wide crisis that sounds suspiciously like children just getting a little dozy after lunch.

The principal in charge of the meeting has committed to increasing the young students’ physical activity; but the parents all have competing theories about the real source of the problem — from too much structure to outdated pedagogical methods. “This school is still stuck in the ’70s,” one mother yells angrily. “Who teaches math anymore?!”

For his part, Louie doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “It’s school right?” he says, a bit baffled by the whole to-do. “And school just sucks.”

Louie’s wise words are worth revisiting today, as children across the country return to class for another year, and parents begin their fretting and fussing. If our kids aren’t skipping off to class with wide grins and springy steps, we tend to fret about how their education is failing them.

Yet a good education can’t be all smiles and self-esteem. School must “suck,” at least a little bit, if it is to teach children the self-discipline and responsibility they will need to survive in the real world as productive adults one day. The greatest service a teacher can do a student is to respect him enough to nudge him to the edge of his academic comfort zone — and hold him accountable for his own work and behaviour. The afternoon blahs are not a catastrophe to be fixed by the administration. They’re a normal bump in the road that kids need to learn to navigate themselves — at least until they’re old enough to turn over the responsibility to Starbucks or Tims.

Louie’s PTA meeting was fictional, but sadly the modern tendency to make the school environment as gentle as possible, and to treat kids like fragile porcelain dolls, is not.

As Michael Zwaagstra, a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, has detailed, no-zero policies — which prohibit teachers from giving students a zero for incomplete or non-existent assignments — are widespread across Canada, even though there’s little evidence that they do any good. Veteran Edmonton teacher Lynden Dorval knows this all too well: He has been fired for insisting on giving out goose-egg grades when students failed to hand in their work.

Zeroes are verboten because they are said to risk turning the students off school altogether. They could even lead to students giving up and dropping out, and how would teachers possibly reach them then?

The same faulty logic lies behind a new New York Department of Education decision to relax its standards for student suspensions. Talking back to a teacher, missing school without an excuse, carrying a beeper — these are all transgressions that used to be enough to get a kid kicked out of school in New York, but no longer.

The department is now telling teachers to confront kids who misbehave with counselling rather than disciplinary consequences — a change that was urged by the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The overarching message is that students belong in the classroom,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the organization said. “This change in the disciplinary code would result in more students in the classroom, more often, and teachers having the mandate to discipline students with positive educational approaches.”

As far as I can tell, the entire point behind these measures seems to be to make school as pleasant and inoffensive as possible, even when doing so negates teachers’ abilities to actually impart students with meaningful lessons or a genuine sense of their own competence. Where is the pride going to come from when today’s generation of students graduate from schools that have applauded them indiscriminately and unwaveringly — as much for work done well as for work not done at all?

The reason a diploma used to mean something is it represented years of effort and slogging and playing by the rules. It was proof of hard and not always fun work. It was a badge of honour earned by showing up and trying, over and over again, even when — nay, especially when — school just really sucked.

If all a diploma represents now is the feat of making it to the end of the teen years without dropping out or pulling a gun in the playground (in New York, a kid can still get suspended for a firearm-related violation, though only for a few months), then it seems an accolade barely worth having. Devaluing education in this way is far more likely to turn kids off learning than would a duly earned zero or suspension.

“You do what you can to improve it,” Louie eventually concedes to his fellow PTA attendees. “But in the end there’s a limit ’cause it’s school and school sucks…remember?”

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.